Writer of things young adult. (And some adult stuff too.)

I’m re-posting this, simply because I’m finding myself in a very similar situation right now.

I’m sitting here this morning with some serious ADD. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block, but more that I have things to tweet and emails to send, and interview questions to come up with for Scripts and Scribes. Oh, and the farmer’s market is going on, but I really shouldn’t take all that time to walk down there, although I barely left my chair yesterday and it would be nice to get out in the fresh air and stretch my legs.

But then I’ll just end up buying overpriced hummus, and too many underpriced vegetables and baguettes that will go rotten and stale, respectively, before I can eat them all. But, on the other hand, I could get my weekly dose of fruit, since (I’m ashamed to admit) the sun-warmed free samples at the farmer’s market are the only fruit I eat on a regular basis.

But then I wouldn’t be writing.

I’ve found the best way to combat the ADD (I don’t actually have ADD by the way – just an innate desire to multitask rather than to deal with things one at a time) is to leave off in your writing right at the beginning or in the middle of a juicy scene. I know it’s tempting, when you’re on a roll, to plow through and write such scenes to completion – and if you’re smack in the middle of your allotted writing time, by all means keep going. But if it’s getting late and you need to get off the computer, don’t bother working into the wee hours to finish the scene; leave your characters hanging, so the next time you sit down you can jump right back into it. Then you won’t even be tempted to think about emails and baguettes, and your weekly attempt to ward off scurvy; you’ll only be concerned with what’s going to happen next in your story.

I’ve figured the best way to get my manuscript beta-reader-ready (hey, that sounds like a commercial jingle) before I start back to work is to just fall back on the tried and true method of having a page quota per day for revisions. With 116 pages remaining and nineteen days to finish, that means (where’s that calculator button on this keyboard?) six pages a day for the next three weeks.

Doable, certainly. But there are going to be days where I’m tied up (doctor’s appointments, dentist appointments, hair appointments, oil change appointments, getting those colored throw pillows for the nursery appointments, “crap we haven’t bought food in over two weeks” appointments.) So of course there will be days when it’s harder to meet the quota. And that’s assuming my little dude doesn’t decide to make an early appearance.

So my writing took a major hit this winter when I found out I was pregnant. Like most women, I was plagued with morning sickness – or in my case, constant sickness. I never thought I’d be jealous of women who were nauseous every morning, but that was before I was nauseous every minute. The worst part was that my “morning” sickness was similar to motion sickness, in that doing anything that required careful concentration (such as, I don’t know, reading and writing) exacerbated it horribly. So I was basically forced into a two-and-a-half-month state of vegetation.

That stage finally ended, but then came the nagging issue of our living situation: a one-bedroom apartment with a baby on the way. Yeah, that wasn’t going to cut it. So we spent another month searching for, and finally finding (at the very end of the month, and not without due panic on my part) a really cool two-bedroom place.

Now, after the headache of moving and everything associated with it (really postal service? Three weeks, and still not one piece of forwarded mail?) it’s finally back to work. And my goal is to finish this dang manuscript before our little dude makes his debut. I’m on hiatus from work for the next five weeks, plus four more before my due date. I’ve got a lot of time now… but we’ll see how this turns out.